Desktop virtualization is an innovative application of virtualization that is reshaping the desktop industry. At the onset of server virtualization, pioneered by VMware, Tier 2/Tier 3 (and beyond) application servers constituted the bulk of virtualized workloads. Server virtualization has recently evolved beyond traditional server workloads to entire desktops running as virtual machines (VMs) on hypervisors. By one industry estimate 70 million desktops constituting ˜16% of worldwide desktops will be virtualized by 2014. Hosted virtual desktops are being rapidly adopted by Enterprise and GET customers as well.
Desktop virtualization has profound implications for WAAS implementations. On one hand virtualized desktops reduce client→server traffic to a series of end-to-end encrypted and compressed screen scrapes. The network sees less and less and is hence able to offer fewer services (e.g. QoS, security etc)—hence being reduced to dumb plumbing. On the other hand, because every keyboard stroke and every mouse click must make its way through the network, the network becomes more critical than ever and must be highly available and robust to accommodate the extra bandwidth requirements.
In order for intermediary WAAS devices to process and accelerate ICA traffic, they must decrypt the ICA traffic in order to examine it. There is a need for a mechanism by which the ICA traffic may be re-encrypted for transport over the WAN in a manner that does not require explicit configuration by the administrator of the WAAS devices.